Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Articles by this author

Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by design. It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope, I fear, for a free press. (Photo: Mr. Fish / Truthdig) Views
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Crucifying Julian Assange
Julian Assange’s sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been transformed into a little shop of horrors. He has been largely cut off from communicating with the outside world for the last seven months. His Ecuadorian citizenship, granted to him as an asylum seeker, is in the process of...
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Gross understood that unchecked corporate power would inevitably lead to corporate fascism. (Photo: Mr. Fish / Truthdig) Views
Monday, November 05, 2018
Scum vs. Scum in This 2018 Midterm
There is perhaps no better illustration of the deep decay of the American political system than the Senate race in New Jersey. Sen. Bob Menendez, running for re-election, was censured by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting bribes from the Florida businessman Salomon Melgen, who was convicted...
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Cults are a product of social decay and despair, and our decay and despair are expanding, soon to explode in another financial crisis.(Photo: Mr.Fish) Views
Monday, October 29, 2018
The Cult of Trump
Cult leaders arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age. The cult...
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Monday, October 22, 2018
The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny or Revolution
At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school for the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans for the next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their cloying sense of entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy...
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The key in Nader’s story to the citizens retaking control of Congress and the government is sustained mass nationwide demonstrations and rallies.(Photo: Sage Ross/flickr/cc) Views
Thursday, October 18, 2018
The Rats Revolt
There is no American who has fought with more tenacity, courage and integrity to expose the crimes of corporate power and to thwart the corporate coup d’état that has destroyed our democracy than Ralph Nader. Not one. There is little he has not tried in that effort. He has written investigative...
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Though federal estimates put the nation’s homeless number at 554,000, most cities—including Portland, which officially has about 4,000 people without shelter—estimate the homeless, notoriously hard to count, to be at least three times higher.(Photo: Mr. Fish / Truthdig) Views
Monday, October 08, 2018
Homeless America
It is 8 a.m. I am in the small offices of Street Roots , a weekly newspaper that prints 10,000 copies per edition. Those who sell the newspaper on the streets—all of them victims of extreme poverty and half of them homeless—have gathered before heading out with their bundles to spend hours in the...
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As in the cases of most lynching victims, the crime Thompson committed was the crime of freedom. (Photo: Mr. Fish / Truthdig) Views
Monday, October 01, 2018
Lynching the Past
I boarded the Gone With the Wind Tour bus outside the train depot built in 1867 to replace the depot burned during the Civil War. The building now houses the Road to Tara Museum . It has displays of “ Gone With the Wind ” movie memorabilia including dolls of Mammy, played in the film by Hattie...
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If we do not heal these wounds, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, when the next financial crisis arrives—and it will arrive—this collective anomie will explode.(Photo: Mr.Fish) Views
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
American Anomie
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book “ On Suicide ” examined the disintegration of social bonds that drive individuals and societies to personal and collective acts of self-destruction. He found that when social bonds are strong, individuals achieve a healthy balance between...
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Monday, September 03, 2018
The Slaves Rebel
The only way to end slavery is to stop being a slave. Hundreds of men and women in prisons in some 17 states are refusing to carry out prison labor, conducting hunger strikes or boycotting for-profit commissaries in an effort to abolish the last redoubt of legalized slavery in America. The strikers...
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A 2016 demonstration in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street movement started five years earlier. (Photo: Corinne Segal / pbs.org) Views
Monday, August 27, 2018
Becoming Serfs
You know the statistics. Income inequality in the United States has not been this pronounced in over a century. The top 10 percent has 50 percent of the country’s income, and the upper 1 percent has 20 percent of the country’s income. A quarter of American workers struggle on wages of less than $10...
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